Elephants intrigue people, there is no doubt of that. Elephants inspire people to tell stories.

The most common stories around elephants are about their sense of memories and their graveyards. The point of the elephant’s graveyard is that there are none.

The idea behind this myth is that an elephant leaves its herd as it nears death and sets off to die alone. This has given rise to the idea of an elephant’s graveyard being a place where ideas and notions that have come to the end of their time finally die.

Why do we have the myth of an elephant’s graveyard in the first place though? This seems to have come about because it is rare to find elephant remains in the wild.

Apart from humans, elephants have few natural predators. Before modern elephant poaching became rife, this meant that most elephants lived to a great old age.

People observed elephants who were old, but rarely saw evidence of dead elephant bodies. This may be because scavengers feast on elephant carcasses, tearing the skeletons apart. Or it may be that many elephants die in riverbeds, searching for water in the dry season.

When the wet season comes the river washes everything in the riverbed away. Nowadays, the sites of elephant deaths are all too common. Poachers shoot elephants for their tusks and leave the carcasses to rot wherever they fall.

As a result, the world’s elephant population is in steep decline in most places. Experts fear that elephants will go extinct in the lifetime of children born today.

However, the sense that elephants have a real sense of memory is partly linked to the way elephants do in fact deal with death. Elephants find it hard to leave the body of a herd member who has died.

Elephants live in close knit herds led by a matriarch, an elderly female. The matriarch usually earns her right to lead the herd because of her wisdom. She leads the herd to food sources, avoids danger and helps pass on the secrets to a long life to the various generations of young in the herd.

Each member of the herd seems acutely aware of and concerned with every other member. Because elephants live so long, the sense of relationship between individuals and across the generations appears very strong.

Elephants appear to mourn when they see a herd member die. They seem to find it hard to leave the body. More intriguingly, elephants – especially the matriarchs - seem to remember the places where herd members died.

They react to these places in a way that seems to mix a sense of loss or mourning with a sense of caution or fear.

In Asia, humans have domesticated elephants for use in war and heavy work for the last two thousand years and more. Humans have learned a great deal about elephants’ capacity to learn and remember during this time.

Working elephants demonstrate a great capacity to master complicated processes that they can then preform time and again without error. There is no doubt that working matriarchs in Asia also help young elephants to work well alongside humans.

However, it is from Africa that the latest evidence of elephants’ capacity to pass on learning now comes. It seems that elephants who raid crops for foods now do so only at the dark of the moon.

Raiding crops brings elephants into dangerous contact with people; Raiding crops on a moonless night is far less risky to the elephants than raiding on moonlit nights when humans can sport the intruders more easily.

And this behavior gives rise to a new question about elephants. Do elephants understand risk and change their behavior to reduce the impact of risk on them?

Given the role that wise matriarchs play in the lives of successful elephant herds, the answer seems to be an obvious yes. An elephant raiding crops on a moonless night has learned to react to risk in just the same way as an elephant that is alert to the place where a herd member once died.

The change of behavior around crop raiding is just that much more obvious and evident to a whole lot more people – including the farmers whose crops the elephants are stealing! Local farmers talk with real awe about the way elephants seem able to steal from them without being heard or seen.

Despite their size, crop-raiding elephants are able to move with absolute stealth, silent and invisible to the farmers on patrol to protect their crops!

In Zimbabwe in southern Africa elephants also seem able to point. Elephants in some of Zimbabwe’s game parks seem to have picked up the concept of pointing from the people they see around them.

These elephants use their trunks to indicate something of interest to each other. This may be the first evidence of a species observing and adopting a human behavior for their own.

Or it may be that intelligent animals do more of this than we humans realise. It is just that when an elephant points with its trunk the gesture is so obvious that no one watching can fail to ignore!

And it is from Africa that evidence comes that adolescent male elephants need the guidance of older females to grow up successfully. Most elephant herds comprise older females and young males.

The young males grow up in the safety of the herd. They leave the herd to forage and fend for themselves when they become adult. However, as poachers kill older elephants for their tusks, more and more young males find themselves on their own before they are equipped to survive on their own.

In the past these young males often found themselves moved by conservationists into protected park areas where they were left to fend on their own. Whenever this happened, the individuals grew up to be very aggressive, dysfunctional adults.

So now, conservationists do their best to put orphaned males in the company of older females so they can learn good behavior and survival skills!